It's not your fault you're a pirate. You've just been trained to download songs from illegal BitTorrent sites, sort of like how you can train a helper monkey. In fact, most likely you are a monkey. Logic. In other news, Steve Jobs says you can have your pesky third-party iPhone applications, but not until February. Why February? Logic.

Cell phone durkadurka
First off, when I saw the show title I thought you were going to talk
about Team America. You didn't. :( Anyway, that sound from cell phones
is particular to GSM phones (Sprint, AT&T, etc). CDMA phones such as
Verizon's do not freak out speakers. Also, it affects magnetic fields,
such as those in microphones and speakers. So it is possible that Tom's
cell affected the mics and the speakers.

Brick term, misuse of
I've noticed that the term "brick"--as in "Oh crap I've bricked my
iPhone!"--is being misused.

To brick means you have created a terminally and irreversibly dead
electronic device. It's no longer a device, it's only functional as a
dead weight. You've probably flashed over the boot-loader firmware, so
it will no longer accept new firmware.

This hasn't happened with the iPhone in any of the cases I've heard you
talk about. They are always reflashable with new firmware.

Just be careful how you use the term "brick" OK. There are engineers out
here. Be kind to us.

Keith

I'm suing Apple!
WTF--another price drop!!

I want my $3.30 back from my iTunes Plus tracks!!

;-)

Thank you,
Robert Hazelrigg

iPod Touch jailbreak for PC
Just thought I'd let you know that there is a way to easily jailbreak
from the PC. There was one even before AriX even made iJailbreak. It's
called touchFree and I wrote it. In fact, AriX messaged me on the
MacRumors forum, and I gave him the source code for my version to help
him out. If you look in the iJailbreak distribution, you can see that
his script bootstraps into some of my code to do the setup on the Touch
itself.

I'm glad AriX was able to deliver an automated iPod touch jailbreak
utility to the Mac community, but I have to admit I'm slightly
disappointed in how my version hasn't gotten any media play, even though
I created the technique used. Perhaps it's because I'm not 13 years old
(I'm 21).

Oh well. The current version of touchFree is hosted at Slovix. Please mention it to your listeners,
many of whom use PCs I'm certain.

I'm also a long-time listener of the show (honestly, your penetration is
a little startling), but I haven't been listening lately due to spending
almost all my waking hours hacking. I'm just catching up now, and that's
why this e-mail's a bit late.

I'll go by my handle for this e-mail,

planetbeing

YouTube copyright filter
I know that the big, bad copyright holders don't like the idea of having
to give up a full copy of their content in order to filter by it. The
idea of using fingerprints works pretty well in certain situation, but
fingerprints tend to be generated using hashing algorithms, so if you
were to take the file and reencode it with a different codec, the
fingerprint is no longer valid. Similarly something as small as
changing the ID-3 tags in an MP3 could render the original fingerprint
useless. By insisting on using full content copies, Google can perform a
more rigorous filtering process.

Peace out, Holmes!

Dave from Ireland

Culture of ownership?
Molly,

I was listening to episode 582, and Culture of Ownership is already
taken, it's business dogma.

Reading my email!
I was bored at work and otherwise might not have noticed this, but did
you say that CNET TV reads my e-mail? Like how the CIA and FBI and other
three-letter government agencies "supposedly" do? Stay out of my inbox,
CNET TV! Some of that stuff is private. Others...well...feel free. I
mean if you want to read about what I'm having for supper or that my
wife wants me to pick up milk on the way home, I guess you can. But the
plans for world domination? No. That sort of thing is too private.

Love the show!

Eric, the graphic designer from Minneapolis
(No, not him, the other one)

About the author

Molly Wood was an executive editor at CNET, author of the Molly Rants blog, and host of the tech show, Always On. When she's not enraging fanboys of all stripes, she can be found offering tech opinions on CBS and elsewhere, and offering opinions on everything else to anyone who will listen.
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